I’m back, healthy foodies, with the promised roasted tomato pasta recipe! Over the weekend I found a fun recipe in a magazine, then Erin saw a different one on TV, and we decided to combine the two to form one super-recipe.<\/p>\n
We Americans have grown so accustomed to the pasta-with-grilled-chicken (or some other meat) dish that pasta without meat seems like only half a meal. And in Italy, it’s just that, since a (usually meatless) pasta course is often served before the meat course. But there’s something so wonderfully humble about that meatless pasta course made with just a few choice ingredients. It’s the difference between the simple, perfect Google homepage and Yahoo’s site, cluttered with useful stuff that nobody really needs. Less is often more. Especially if “less” is served with a glass of Chianti.<\/p>\n
The problem with meatless pasta, of course, is that it’s often not filling enough, especially for marathon training. This was my big complaint about Pasta with Roasted Cauliflower and Arugula<\/a>.\u00a0 You can use Barilla Plus<\/a> pasta to make it a little more substantial, but the difference is small.\u00a0 Instead, we added chickpeas to boost the protein and healthy calorie content.\u00a0 A lot of people think adding beans, potatoes, or anything else starchy to pasta is weird, but they do it in Italy all the time.\u00a0 Even in classics like Trenette with Pesto, Beans, and Potatoes<\/a>.\u00a0 Try it; nothing will happen to you!<\/p>\n Erin and I unquestionably gave this meal 4 cows out of 5.\u00a0 A first-ballot Hall-of-Famer.\u00a0 That fact that it’s not a “5” is no knock on it; we just can’t be giving those out like Halloween candy.<\/p>\n If a “5” is a meal two standard deviations better than the mean, and we assume meal quality is distributed normally with mean 3, then only about 2.5 percent should be getting a “5”!\u00a0 I can think of plenty of good arguments against my assumptions, like the fact that almost all the meals have been rated “3” or higher, so I’ll just stop.\u00a0 Here’s the recipe.<\/p>\n![\"Plate](\"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/019.jpg\")
This meal is fantastic.\u00a0 Using fresh plum tomatoes and fresh lemon zest makes the sauce taste, well, really fresh.\u00a0 The tomatoes are roasted in the oven with garlic, Italian seasoning, and some crushed red pepper for just the perfect amount of hot damn! <\/em>And the acidity of the tomatoes nicely balances the bitterness of the arugula, which we got fresh-picked from the first farmers’ market of the season (if you haven’t discovered the joy of the farmers’ market yet, use the Local Harvest<\/a> link in my Blogroll to find one near you).<\/p>\nRoasted Tomato Pasta with Chickpeas Recipe<\/h3>\n
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